[jxm262]

I've actually felt this same way for a while now. This past year or so I've worked hard (imo) to "get" the benefits of strong typing, but can't shake the feeling that the tradeoffs just aren't worth it. I was hoping the verbosity, complexity, etc (strong types), would give me more confidence and security in my code. It always seems like a false sense of security though and I'm currnently on the fence as to whether or not it's worth it.

Is there any studies done showing that strong typing is actually a disadvantage? I've seen some stating the opposite, but nothing really stood out to me. Sorry for the long rant, but at this point I can't find anything empirically stating one is better than the other.

[kazinator]

Static typing (and other static checks) will reduce the round trips between editing and running. Some of your typos that are not syntax errors get caught and reported to you. Of course, you were going to test that code anyway. But you avoided a bit of wasted time. However, this advantage can be eroded by the trade offs.

Interesting experience recently: I added static checks to a Lisp dialect which report warnings for all occurrences of unbound variables and functions. (Not type checking, but a very basic static check). According to static proponents, bugs of this type should exist left and right if we don't have the check.

Only one instance of an unbound variable was found in the dialect's standard library: and that was a function that was added as an afterthought and never tested. The problem reproduced 100% when calling the function in any correct manner whatsoever; the function was completely broken. If it had been called just once after having been written, the problem would have been caught.

I fixed the problem so that the warning went away and caught myself almost starting to think about commit the fix, when I realized: what am I doing? I still haven't called the function. Gee, it now passes the one feeble static check that was added, so it must be correct? Haha.

[justinhj]

For me the only downside of strong typing is that code takes longer to write. It's reminiscent of my years writing C++ where often fiddling around with header files, type declarations and templates would seemingly take up more time than the actual logic of the program. For the last few years I've been working in Scala and compared to Clojure it can take longer to knock out working code. That said with the help of type inferencing and IntelliJ it is nowhere near as slow as C++ was, and now I find that the benefits of strongly typed code greatly outweigh the costs in terms of syntax and development speed.

[yawaramin]

> ... type declarations and templates would seemingly take up more time than the actual logic of the program....

Just a small point: type declarations are part of the actual logic of the program. In type theory, types are logical propositions and values are proofs of those propositions.